The present invention relates generally to accessing low-level sources of a computer system during the initial booting process, and more particularly to a user-friendly technique for enabling easy access to the pre-boot functions in a personal computer without requiring hardware modifications.
Personal computers (pc's) are well known in the art and arc virtually ubiquitous in today's world used as both a business tool and consumer appliance. When a pc is first turned on by depressing the main power button, the device enters into what is referred to as a boot process. That process is defined by initialization control information to load the available programs in the BIOS start-up since there is nothing in memory initially to execute. There are some pre-boot diagnostics that occur, such as the Power On Self Test (or just POST), to check that various things in the computer are functioning properly. During pre-booting of the computer it is possible for the user to enter a pre-boot environment to be able to update one or more low-level system resources.
In recent years with a greater number of functions and programs being added to new computers, the boot times have increased substantially causing irritation to impatient users. Programs like TweakUI have become popular to customize and speed up the response time of the Start Menu. Consequently some pc and software vendors responded to the long boot-time complaints by enabling users to skip some of the normal tests and enter what is referred to as a quick boot or “quick-start” process to speed up the basic booting process often to something less than 30 seconds. This was generally seen as a great advance by most impatient users, since they did not want to suffer through a “lengthy” booting process. In doing so however, it became increasingly difficult to access the pre-boot functionality in the boot device selection menu. There are several reasons for the short access window, but the main two reasons he in the keyboard (KB) controller initialization and the graphics sequence. In some cases it is possible to complete the POST testing before either the KB controller or graphics cards are responding. Since it is normally necessary to use the keyboard to enter the pre-boot sequence (by depressing a special hot-key like “F1” or a key sequence like CNTL+ESC), the user of a quick boot pc is often locked out of the normal pre-boot sequence since the system boots up before the user can functionally access the keyboard or see the graphics on a display screen. For quick booting systems, what is clearly needed is a simple and. inexpensive method of entering the pre-boot functionality without requiring the use of the keyboard.
While the following discussion focuses primarily on a desktop pc, it certainly could be used in any computer whether or not the quick-boot functionality has been added to the computer.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one skilled in the art, through comparison of such devices with a representative embodiment of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.